Hasan Akkanat

Three divine attributes discussed in the classical ages of Islamic theology were established as a doctrine in time, and the other doctrines of divine attributes were removed from the Sunnī theology. Divine knowledge is an attribute whose activity is generally to know all possible options about the universe, while the divine will is another attribute whose activity is to choose only one of the similar or dissimilar options. But they are seen incompatible when considered in the frame of God’s relationship to the universe: if it is obviously known which option will happen, it is not really chosen at the moment of choice, and if it is uncertain which option will be chosen, it cannot be known which option will happen until preference. What is problematic here is that you attempt to design the divine attributes and actions according to two-valued logic: His all activities must happen one after another. Then, which solution is proposed for the issue by al-Ghazālī, who claims that knowledge and the will are the mutually compatible and complementary attributes for God’s relationship to the universe? I discuss whether al-Ghazālī supports his claim with adequate arguments or not.

The subject that God knows the particulars in a universal way has become one of the main philosophical problems that especially medieval Islamic thinkers focused upon and interpreted after Ghazali’s critiques. The essence of the problem is that particulars change constantly and are perceived ; the knowledge of particulars involves knowledge of changes in the particulars. If we try to know it, our knowledge will change for the knowledge depends on its subject. Besides, the universals are in the intellect and apprehended by it, and never change. Then, how can the human intellect understand the particulars? If knowledge of the particulars changes the intellect while they are apprehended, why doesn’t same knowledge change God? Or if God knows particulars in a universal way, then how does He distinguish the particulars from each other? Some thinkers, such as Marmura and Leaman, added to this questions the new ones to critisize it again in the last century. We don’t hold most of their critiques, and discuss all of the questions above mentioned according to the philosophers’ passages; but we also critisize the philosophers in different ways in the conclusion